Mission and Ecstasy: Contemplative Women and Salvation in Colonial Spanish America and the Philippines by Magnus Lundberg (review)

At the center of this book is an intriguing paradox: how can contemplative women assume apostolic roles? Aren’t the cloister and the mission fields absolutely separate physical spaces? Yes, but as the author convinces us, this is only if we understand missionary work in a very literal way. If we join him in understanding mission “more inclusively as acts made by a person perceived to be in favor of the salvation of others” (p. 16), we can immediately grasp how Spanish American nuns and beatas, enmeshed in a social world in which “heathens” and “bad Christians” abounded, could find ways to participate in the urgent efforts to convert them. Using an impressive corpus of hagiographies, funeral sermons, spiritual autobiographies, and commissioned diaries (that is to say, both male- and female-generated texts) Lundberg identifies five ways that religious women acted to try to save others’ souls. These are love, prayer, suffering, teaching, and flight, to each of which a chapter is devoted. Each begins with a brief and accessible discussion of the theology around these concepts, and then follows with multiple interesting, well-presented case studies from throughout the Americas and the Philippines.

The “love” chapter departs from the idea that there are two sides to charity: love of God and love of neighbor, each impossible without the other. Thus religious women who “burned” with the love of God often also burned with the desire to contribute to others’ salvation. In Spanish America, these women often expressed frustration that they could not die in the mission fields, wishing they were men so that martyrdom would be possible. The bulk of the chapter thus concerns the surprisingly vividly-expressed preoccupation in the texts with what cloistered women couldn’tdo, despite their love for their neighbors and, of course, for God.

This leads to the second chapter, on prayer, which is focused on the intercessory role of religious women—in other words, not on their frustrations but with the actions they couldtake to advance conversion. Women or their hagiographers wrote of visiting purgatory and even hell to intercede for the dead. Of course, they also prayed for the living, both the missionaries themselves and the unconverted. Although the case studies are excellent, there was a bit of a letdown from the exciting “love” chapter, in the sense that these women burning with apostolic zeal could “only” pray for conversion. Prayer is, after all, what we already understand to be at the center of religious women’s lives. The third chapter, on suffering, emphasizes that women could become “manly” through pain and torture of the body, but it still seemed to be mainly about things we already know about religious women and therefore to take us farther away from the unique story of the apostolic desires of religious women.

The chapters on teaching and flight, however, bring us squarely back to the central theme of the book. Both are about active efforts to reach the mission fields.

Nuns, from the cloister, could advise missionaries and others who needed their help to save their own souls or the souls of others. Beatas, who could be less restricted in their movements, could actually catechize among the indigenous people and thus participate directly in a mission. The nuns who took spiritual flight to the mission fields were in obvious ways providing edifying and inspiring accounts that advanced the missionary effort.

In sum, the paradox proves not to be irreconcilable; nuns and beatasnot only wished to advance the missionary effort but also found ways to do so. This book, through wonderful case studies, tells us not only how, but in the process, gives us another way to think about the experience of religious women in colonial Spanish America as distinct from that of religious women in Europe.